“Nightmarish.”
That’s how costume designer Lyn Paolo describes the week before The West Wing started filming. It all stemmed from this one problem. “We didn’t have any cast.”
This is not to say the roles hadn’t been filled. They largely had been. But several of the deals hadn’t yet closed, and there were hundreds of other details to attend to before anyone came anywhere near yelling “Action!” Then…in the five days leading up to principal photography, a sudden flurry of fittings overtook the wardrobe department.
The last of these would mark the i-dotting, t-crossing end of that very public negotiation we mentioned earlier. It would involve Warner Bros., NBC, a trio of West Wing heavy hitters…and Sodapop from The Outsiders. Which is how it would come to be that, the night before filming the pilot’s very first scene, Lyn Paolo’s fitting room was getting a little crowded.
Standing together, Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme watched Rob Lowe as their last-minute, newly minted Sam Seaborn tried on suits while officially signing his contract, just hours before the next day’s five a.m. call time. It was crazy, if not totally unprecedented, for Rob to be trying on suits and shoes—and a shirt he’d soon be taking off—before the ink had even dried, but…better late than never.
Days earlier, another cast member had entered the wardrobe department’s inner sanctum. Sam Seaborn’s boss, Toby Ziegler, was a bit older, more than a bit less sunny, and played by an actor Lyn Paolo loves, one whose first impression she won’t soon forget. “Richard walks in—one of those big fitting rooms at Warner Bros., we had nine or ten racks of clothes for him—and I was like, ‘Nice to meet you, come on in!’ He glanced around and said, ‘Yeah, I don’t see anything in this room that’s gonna work for Toby.’ ”
“I love him for that!” Lyn told us with an affectionate laugh. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you sit down for a minute, let’s just talk about who you think Toby is, and maybe we can figure out a way to move forward just for the first episode.’ We were there for a couple of hours. He finally put stuff on and walked out and goes, ‘This was great. I love everything!’ ”
Looking back, this had to have been one of the earliest examples of The West Wing’s culture of respect for process. As Lyn put it to us, “I think with actors, it has to be a dialogue. It’s my job to hear them and to let them know that they’ve been heard.”
When it came to making the pilot, Tommy had exactly thirteen days and at least one guiding principle: “I wanted to shoot the beginning in order, and try to shoot the pilot in sequence as much we possibly could.” Due to typical production restraints, that wasn’t entirely doable, but the director hoped to shoot the introductions of the characters prior to their appearing in the White House. This is how Rob Lowe went from signing his contract while trying on suits to sitting slumped in a makeup chair just hours later. His first two scenes were the first ones up.
When we chatted with Rob, it seemed like he could still feel the shudder of that first West Wing wake-up. “Whoa…so early,” he said, wide-eyed. “It sounds insane to say now, but I had never done a TV series.” And it was an hour-long TV series, which is extra brutal on the sleep schedule. For the first scene shot—in the bar at the Biltmore Hotel—Rob set his alarm for four a.m. As someone used to acting in movies, that had to be a real shock to the system. (MARY: You know what TV actors call a four a.m. wake-up? “Monday morning.”)
Per Tommy’s pilot hopes and dreams—and since Sam Seaborn had not yet arrived at the White House—Rob’s introduction sequence continued apace, including the “company move” (when the entire crew moves to a new location) to Laurie’s bedroom. That’s where viewers woke up with Sam and his call girl–slash–law student date from the bar, where they first heard the word “POTUS,” and, as Rob put it to us, “where I took my shirt off for the first and only time in the history of The West Wing—just enough to get the show on the air.”
From the hotel bar to Laurie’s bedroom and on through the rest of the pilot, Aaron was on set the entire time, never leaving Tommy’s side. He was there for Leo’s complaints about the spelling of “Khaddafi” in the New York Times crossword puzzle, for Josh waking up (groggy and drooling) with his head on his desk, for Toby kvetching on the airplane about having to turn off his cell…and, of course, for C.J.’s much-anticipated treadmill pratfall.
C.J. CREGG
See, it’s all about budgeting your time. This time, this hour, this is my time. Five a.m. to six a.m. I can work out, as you see. I can think about personal matters. I can…meet an interesting man.
(Soon her beeper goes off and, well, you know the rest…)
Over the next thirteen days, Tommy and Aaron oversaw what cast and crew recall as an exceptionally professional, impressive beginning. Rob Lowe describes the production of the pilot as “smooth from start to finish. It was heaven on earth.” That said, “smooth” does not always mean easy. Take that opening walk-and-talk…
The inspiration for this introductory scene did not originate on the West Wing soundstage. While some may point to the on-the-move Steadicam sequences that John Wells and Tommy used on ER—or that Aaron and Tommy employed to such stellar effect on Sports Night—the seed of that first walk-and-talk had been planted years before.
Prior to The West Wing, the director and his family had enjoyed a Lincoln Bedroom stay at the Clinton White House. Outside the Oval, while waiting to speak to the president, Tommy witnessed a moment that would come to define what he calls “the movement of the show.”
“I remember the doors opening up and Stephanopoulos and other staffers coming out, talking to each other, some going this way, some going that way.” To Tommy, as that Oval Office meeting ended, it felt like another was still going on. “It never stops, they’re constantly juggling, there was never downtime.” Reflecting on that moment years later, he hoped to create that same energy for The West Wing, a sense of “this world that was all continuous.”
Wisely, Tommy and Aaron and John Wells had stacked the cast with theater actors. For folks like Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, Brad Whitford, and John Spencer, these long, involved takes, which often included dense, fast-paced dialogue and intricate, ranging choreography, were right up their alley.
As John Spencer revealed in a 2002 interview with CNN’s David Daniel, when it came to his opening sequence on The West Wing, he was deep in his comfort zone. “As written, they were eight separate scenes. Tommy came to me the first or the second day of rehearsal and said, ‘I have an idea. I would like to put those eight scenes together in a walk-and-talk and have you sort of geographically show us the West Wing. It’s going to be our first vision of this workplace.’ ” Taking eight mini-scenes and combining them into one long nonstop scene? For an actor who’d spent the first two decades of his career onstage, it was like Christmas morning.
Seeing the sequence on its feet a handful of times was enough for the director to realize they were onto something. “We figured out a visual way to shoot it,” Tommy says, “as well as a performance and a level of energy.” After rehearsal, he knew—and he didn’t want to know it alone.
“I was in my office a couple of days before shooting on the pilot started,” Aaron remembers. “Tommy popped his head in and asked me to come to the set so he could show me something. Tommy with an idea is like a kid who’s just learned a new card trick. As originally written, the pilot opened with each staff member learning that POTUS had injured himself while on vacation. (The opening depended entirely on the audience not knowing what the acronym POTUS stood for, which, when the show premiered, they did not.) After that opening,” Aaron says, “we go to the White House for the first time and follow Leo down a corridor and into Josh’s office, where the rest of the scene is played, after which we cut to Leo’s office. Tommy—taking out his ‘deck of cards’—said, ‘What if instead of cutting to Leo’s office, the scene was continuous and we walked there?’ He took me on the route he was pitching—Leo enters the lobby, walks through what we called ‘Josh’s Bullpen,’ went into Josh’s office, then back into the lobby, past the communications bullpen, into Mrs. Landingham’s office, through the Oval…and into his own office. No cuts. I’d write dialogue to cover the whole shot. Tommy had just invented the shooting style of the show.”
One bit of dialogue from this opening includes a memory that Tommy still cherishes. Turning to Aaron at a West Wing reunion panel at the ATX TV Festival in 2016, he said, “I remember shooting this…asking you to include my three children’s names.”
LEO
Hey, Emma.
EMMA
Morning.
LEO
Wilson.
WILSON
Hey, Leo.
LEO
Joe.
“I can’t believe Aaron did that,” Tommy said. “It was so loving.”
It took just under twenty tries to film that entire introduction to the West Wing, and while that may sound like a lot, it was more or less par for the course. For any walk-and-talk, all it takes is one actor to flub a line, one Steadicam operator to slightly stumble, one boom mic to dip into frame, and it’s—to quote a thousand exasperated ADs—“back to one!”
But, in John Spencer’s hands, one of the most ambitious sequences in the show’s history (and the heaviest lift of the pilot) seemed like just another day at the office. “That charge of being able to do eight scenes back-to-back without stopping,” John would tell David Daniel, “is sort of like a stage performance. It’s thrilling.”
Tommy shared John’s excitement. “To have this group of mostly theater actors who could do that felt like everything came together for me right at that moment.”
Now, if you’re going to walk-and-talk your way through a world, you have to have somewhere to walk and talk. And it’s worth noting that the world in which Leo and the others were walking-and-talking represented a sizable investment by the studio, in terms of dollars and faith in the project. The financial outlay to the production budget spared no expense and imbued the show with both a sense of grandeur and an uncommon focus on the tiniest details. The piles of carpeting were thick, the flowers in and around the offices were real and fresh, the portraits of former presidents were accurate down to the last detail, and the Oval Office was an exact replica.
They’re beautiful sets, they’re the most beautiful sets I’ve ever worked on. The detail is exquisite. I remember the first time I walked into the Oval Office, it just took my breath away.
—ALLISON JANNEY, “INAUGURATION,” BEHIND-THE-SCENES DVD FEATURETTE
As unusual as the number of dollars invested may have been, it made sense to the key creatives in charge. “It’s the world we live in,” Tommy recounted to us matter-of-factly. “It’s the most important office building in the world. These are big-ticket items.”
It wasn’t just the richness of the detail and the overall opulence of the set; it was the size and scope of it all. As Aaron acknowledges, “Warner Bros. made a gigantic commitment…before it was ever picked up for series…by building the biggest set, by a wide margin, ever built for a pilot.”
The massive set included more than that exact replica of the Oval. It was the residence, the kitchen, the Mural Room, the Roosevelt Room, the press briefing room, and the bustling communications bullpen; the offices of the chief of staff, the press secretary, and their assistants…and the countless hallways that connected them all. The set was, in fact, so vast that, for the first season, it had to be divided between two adjacent television soundstages. In the pilot, one walk-and-talk has Leo and Josh crossing a lobby and through a set of double doors, then continuing seamlessly down a corridor. “That continuation happened in a different building on a different day,” Aaron says. “That’s how we were doing the show. People would walk through one door on a Tuesday, walk out the other side on a Thursday in a different building.”
Luckily for all involved, starting in season 2 the studio moved production to a larger soundstage typically used for feature films. Having the entire set in one spot made sequences like the one with Leo and Josh far more manageable.
The stages weren’t the only aspect of The West Wing that changed from the pilot to the second season. Take Donna, for instance. Aaron had initially envisioned the character as relatively minor, just one amid the buzzing beehive of junior West Wing staffers. Then Janel Moloney showed up.
“She was a day player on the pilot who came in as my assistant,” Brad says. “But I remember her being absolutely luminous. After the first Josh-Donna bit—we have a sort of smartass exchange—I went up to Aaron at the monitors and said, ‘Oh my God, I love her!’ ” Aaron was right there with him.
“Janel Moloney was a revelation,” Aaron says. “She had one little scene…with a couple of lines. She came in and did beautifully. When we finally got the pilot in the can, we were a couple of minutes short. I needed to add a little scene…”
DONNA
Put it on.
JOSH
No.
DONNA
You’ve been wearing the same clothes for 31 hours now, Josh.
JOSH (OFF-SCREEN)
I am not getting spruced up for these people, Donna.
DONNA
All the girls think you look really hot in this shirt.
From off-screen, Josh grabs the shirt and tie. Donna walks out of the office.
That was the first in a long-running series of flirtations that, much further down the road, would drive these two into each other’s arms. Aaron couldn’t help noticing. “This thing started developing between the two of them,” he says, “so in the second episode I had her back, and then the third…She did all twenty-two that first season. The second season we made her what she already was—a series regular.”
Allison Janney, of course, came in as a series regular, and from her very first scene—side-eye chatting up that “interesting man” at the gym—she hit the ground running (so to speak). To prep for the role of press secretary, Allison sought out someone who knew the lay of that particular land, former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Now a member of Aaron’s writing staff, Dee Dee was happy to help Allison get her arms around what it was like for a real-life C.J.
“Over dinner,” Allison says, “Dee Dee and I talked about the challenges that come with being one of the few women in the often male-dominated inner sanctum of DC. It’s a challenge wherever, even now, but it was far more pronounced back then. The ‘boys club’ dynamic can be…persistent,” she told us. “Finding a way to assimilate isn’t easy.”
What John Wells appreciated about Allison from day one was the seemingly effortless fluency she brought to the material—material, the actress will tell you, that she sometimes barely understood. “It’s not enough to simply have the lines memorized,” John points out. “It’s much closer to doing Shakespeare—you really have to understand the subtext.” Allison’s ability to execute that degree of verbal dexterity and convincingly fall on her face was there from the moment they began filming the pilot, and it never went away.
Tommy Schlamme summed up Allison best. “Her whole thing is, ‘I’ve got to perform this. That’s my job. I will keep working until I can figure out a way to make it truthful,’ which is why I’ve never, ever, seen her lie. I used to always go to Allison and ask her to do another take, and the only reason was, I just loved watching her. It was fine, I don’t have a note, but just…go do it again. For nothing more than my entertainment!”
Speaking of “entertainment,” let’s talk about Richard Schiff and his first two weeks rehearsing then shooting the pilot. There’s a bunch of stories we could tell, but we’ve narrowed it down to two. First up…
Toward the end of the pilot, we arrive at the Mural Room scene where Josh has to offer a bow-and-scrape apology to evangelical battle-axe Mary Marsh, for insulting her on TV. (“Lady, the god you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud!”) With Toby and C.J. by his side—and the Reverend Al Caldwell and a flock of religious Right figures on hers—Josh digs deep for the humility and contrition that will, he hopes and prays, keep President Bartlet from showing him the door. Problem was, to one actor anyway, a certain part of the scene didn’t quite make sense.
“It’s when Toby turns on Mary Marsh,” Richard told us. “I got Josh there to apologize and then Mary Marsh makes a comment about ‘that New York sense of humor.’ And that was supposed to turn Toby and all of a sudden I go after her.”
TOBY
She meant Jewish. When she said “New York sense of humor,” she was talking about you and me.
“I said to Tommy and Aaron, ‘Why am I turning? There’s no reason for me to make this turn.’ And Tommy goes, ‘You’ve got a Judah button!’ I’m like, ‘What’s a Judah button?’ He goes, ‘He’s got radar—he can tell that somebody is antisemitic. He can just, you know…smell it out.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. This guy has been around the world, he’s been around antisemitism all his life. He’s gotta have a reason to make this turn. Because we’re at a disadvantage, our tails are between our legs, and now she’s just made this heinous revelation with her comment on Jews. She’s got to want to take advantage and turn Josh’s misstep on television into a bargaining chip. That’s when my hackles go up.’ ”
After a lengthy discussion with Aaron, Brad, and Tommy, Richard remembers, Aaron came up with the line that connected the dots. “Mary Marsh turns to me and goes, ‘What do we get?’ I say, ‘I’m sorry?’ And she goes, ‘What do we get?’ This woman is trying to take political advantage of Josh’s faux pas, trying to turn it into a negotiation. As soon as he hears that, Toby turns.”
For Richard, working through the scene with Aaron and Tommy was a defining moment. It meant a lot to him “as a participant with these two brilliant men.” It was also a defining moment for Toby. “Her blatant opportunism is what gets my dander up, not a Judah Button. He’s instantly like…That’s not how you negotiate in my room.”
This part of our conversation really hit home. The instinct for an actor—for anyone, really—to “go along to get along,” to “God, just do it”—can be hard to suppress. Richard’s insistence may have meant the task at hand took a little longer, but aspiring to that granular level of detail isn’t a vice; it’s a virtue. Just ask seven seasons of Toby Ziegler.
This same scene—the apology meeting with the Christian Right—was among the last ones shot and was filmed over the final days of production. “The first time I met Martin, other than the read-through,” Richard says, “was the first scene he did. ‘I am the Lord your God.’ That big entrance.”
VAN DYKE
The First Commandment says, “Honor thy Father.”
TOBY
No it doesn’t.
JOSH
Toby—
TOBY
It doesn’t!
JOSH
Listen—
TOBY
No—if I am gonna make you sit through this preposterous exercise, we’re gonna get the names of the damn commandments right!
MARY
O-kay, here we go.
TOBY
“Honor thy Father” is the Third Commandment!
VAN DYKE
Then what’s the First Commandment?
A booming voice comes from off-screen. The camera moves to show…
PRESIDENT BARTLET
“I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other God before me.” Boy, those were the days, huh?
“Every time we shot that big entrance,” Richard remembers, “[Martin] would go over to crafty for chicken wings. And he’d come back—full of life and goodwill, and humor—with two gigantic cheeks filled with chicken, and grease all over his face. We’d start rehearsing the next shot with his mouth full, and he’d crack me up. I couldn’t stop laughing. This was the thing with Martin—once he fucked up, he did something that set me off…and I’d be gone for forty minutes.”
We can confirm this with one hundred percent certainty, based on personal experience. Through seven seasons of The West Wing, there may have been no greater threat to the smooth run of production than Richard Schiff with an uncontrollable case of the giggles. In moments like this, Richard was forced to deploy an unconventional acting strategy.
“Martin comes in—‘I am the Lord your God!’—and there’s this long loop [around the room] that he does. I would hold in my laughter…muscularly hold it still…feel the camera come off of me and run to the Oval Office and start laughing, trying to catch my breath, laughing and slapping my face and kind of…sensing the timing. Then I’d run back to my spot as the camera was coming back in, and be there for when he landed back in his spot. I had to do that, like, fifteen times.”
On a rewatch of the pilot for the season 1 DVD commentary track, Tommy revealed that, as initially scripted, the end of the episode took place entirely in the Mural Room. Not just Josh’s apology, the botched negotiation, and Bartlet’s deus ex machina moment, but POTUS’s closing remarks to his staff as well. “All of what occurred…in the Oval,” he says, “[originally] took place in that same room where they met with the Christian Right.” What made more sense to Tommy was to get the evangelicals out of Bartlet’s White House, then bring the staff into what the director referred to as “the sanctuary” of the Oval Office. Aaron agreed.
There, standing behind the Resolute desk, President Bartlet delivers the first ever of too-many-to-count inspirational speeches. Tommy still remembers the first time he came across that uplifting address. “Sitting on the couch in my living room…about two in the morning…reading the West Wing pilot script.” He was overwhelmed.
PRESIDENT BARTLET
Naval Intelligence reports approximately 1200 Cubans left Havana this morning. Approximately 700 turned back due to severe weather, some 350 are missing and presumed dead. 137 have been taken into custody in Miami and are seeking asylum. With the clothes on their back they came through a storm, and the ones that didn’t die want a better life, and they want it here. Talk about impressive.
Closing the script, Tommy couldn’t wait to meet Aaron. “My parents are immigrants and he wrote this beautiful speech…the essence of what you hope that our leaders feel. In shooting it, you just sort of keep your fingers crossed that you do service to what he wrote.”
“What’s next?” These two words are by now iconic as the final line of the West Wing pilot, to the point where we can’t imagine it ending any other way. But, as initially scripted, the episode closed quite differently.
BARTLET
Josh. “Too busy being indicted for tax fraud?” Don’t ever do it again.
JOSH
Yes sir.
Josh exits. The door closes. Blackout.
“It was written,” Tommy says, “that the curtain would drop as Josh closes the door. That would have been great onstage. It wouldn’t have been great on a television show, where you’re going to go to a car commercial right after.” Tommy’s vision for this moment leaned toward expanding the scope of the world, as opposed to making it meditative and internal.
As Aaron put it, “Tommy wanted a…‘and the world goes on’ ending…so we could see this is just another day doing business in the White House. He asked me, ‘Can we not have the abrupt ending? Can we pull back?’ So I said okay and right after Josh goes, I had [Bartlet] shout, ‘Mrs. Landingham—what’s next?’ ”
It’s kind of a perfect phrase, right? This idea—that there’s always another problem to solve, that every day we get up and try to do better, that the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die—embodies the aspirational beauty of politics and service. On the other hand…
“He just had to come up with the line,” Tommy says with a laugh, “because God forbid someone’s not talking for a while.”
Aaron, for his part, couldn’t have been happier with the way the pilot turned out. “It was incredibly exciting,” he said, “for all of us. Especially as you watch all the layers go in. You’re there, obviously, during shooting, so you’re seeing the performances, and then you’re seeing the performances cut together, and then Snuffy Walden’s laying down his incredible score and that’s fantastic. And suddenly…it looks like a TV show.”
What had started out as a smoke break in Aaron Sorkin’s basement, an idea based on a movie poster pointed out by a friend, had suddenly become a thing in the world. Whether it would be seen as a worthy piece of entertainment—whether it would be seen at all—hundreds of people working thousands of hours had taken one man’s inspired words and transformed them into a living, breathing, walking, talking universe.
The questions, then, were these: Who on earth was going to watch this perhaps too-fast-paced show about the slow grind of politics…and would they even like it? The answers would come soon enough—fast and not so furious, in fact—from a man named Peter Roth.